


Fever Dream

by fenwinter



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: (on a technicality), Canonical Character Death, M/M, papaisa, slight holiday star spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8164717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenwinter/pseuds/fenwinter
Summary: Isa remembers.





	

Isa’s head hits the desk in a sort of painful half-stupor, and he senses rather than outright feels the pain from the impact. Takaba Labs is dissolving and so is Ryuuji’s mild face, twisted with concern, but out of the oncoming darkness behind Isa’s eyes the doctor’s voice sounds, muffled yet unmistakable. It’s the usual barrage of questions: Did you get enough sleep, Isa? Have you eaten? Do you need me to get anything? Medicine? I can run to the vending machine and see if there’s anything you’d like, how about that? The cafeteria is a bit of a walk from here, but if you want me to, I can—

Isa forces his eyes open and swivels them with difficulty towards the direction of the noise. Ryuuji lays a palm on Isa’s forehead and withdraws it almost immediately.

“Isa, you’re burning with fever,” he says. “Hang on.”

He shoves off from the desk in his rolling chair and comes to a stop on the other side of the room, where he picks up the phone and dials the number for the central offices. “Kawara speaking,” he says. “Get me line four…”

Isa lets his concentration slip. It’s blessedly cool behind his eyelids; the blurry split-channel fungicide samples on the computer monitor made his head swim all morning, and he has been reading the same sentence in the department newsletter for the past twenty minutes. Ryuuji returns, still rolling in his chair, slippered feet scrabbling for purchase against the linoleum floor.

“Let’s put you to bed,” Ryuuji says. “I think there’s a spare cot in the break room.”

* * *

_Why do you care so much about me? What have I ever done for you?_

Ryuuji walks him down the hall, lets him lean on his solid frame and drape one arm around his neck. Isa breathes in Ryuuji’s peculiar scent, latex and coffee and tobacco and a sort of dusty sweet peppermint, and allows himself to lean more heavily against his warmth. He’s shivering from the fever which is somehow affecting his joints as well; he’s favoring his left leg more than ever. Ryuuji seems to notice this, and he slows their pace down considerably.

“This should be better,” he says, opening the nearest door and showing Isa through. He dims the lights, deposits Isa in a chair, and returns minutes later with a flimsy plastic cup of water from the machine down the hall. “Drink up, all right? You’ll feel better in no time.”

Isa sips the water, trying to ignore the odd taste in his mouth. Ryuuji brings a collapsible cot over and fluffs up the pillow.

“Do you need anything else?”

Isa shakes his head. The room spins.

“Just rest up, Isa,” he says quietly, and places one hand on Isa’s shoulder. Isa does not flinch.

_I don’t mind when you touch me. I feel safe when you’re near me. You don’t talk down to me. I want to impress you with my work. I love the sound of your voice. When your face lights up I feel giddy..._

“Doctor Kawara,” Isa says.

Ryuuji turns around, concern in his eyes. “Yeah, Isa?”

“Why…” Isa ventures. “Why do you bother with me?” is what he settles on, and Ryuuji looks taken aback. He sits down on the edge of the cot and stares down at his lap.

“I became a scientist because I wanted to change the world,” Ryuuji says at last. “I always knew that, even when I was really young. You and I, Isa—we aren’t just scientists. We aren’t just researchers in some lab, we’re _artists._ We are designing the future. We won’t sit here passively and let the world shape us; we are going to shape the world. We are the most powerful people I know.”

Isa looks down at himself, crippled and weak with fever. He smiles a little. It’s an enticing thought.

“Science is the future. We are the future, and you, Isa—to me, you embody that potential.”

Their faces are close now, and Isa can nearly taste the stale tobacco on Ryuuji’s breath. He looks Isa straight in the eyes, more seriously than Isa has ever seen him before.

“I want _everything_ for you, Isa. Everything.”

Isa finds that his eyes are damp—but the room is dim and maybe Ryuuji can’t tell—he must say _something_ or else he’s going to regret it—

“Doctor Kawara,” he says, his voice an unsteady rasp. “Thank you.”

Ryuuji leans down over Isa and his stubble scratches Isa’s cheek. Slowly, tenderly, he presses the softest of kisses onto Isa’s cracked lips, and it is then that Isa realizes that he is dreaming. The memory is real enough, but this ending is not, and Isa doesn’t want it to slip away as dreams so often do once they become lucid. He moans into the imaginary kiss, barely loud enough for himself to hear, let alone Ryuuji, but that was how it always went back then, wasn’t it?  

* * *

Doctor Kawara, that was always the title. Doctor Kawara, Doctor Kawara, Doctor Kawara. Kawara this and Kawara that. And late at night, whispered between bedsheets for his ears only, betrayed by his own audacity, Ryuuji. Ryuuji, Ryuuji, _Ryuuji_ like a mad murmuring chant, picking up speed and volume till he broke and it was all over, the illusion dissolving, and it was just Isa and damp sheets and creased covers and hot spasms of shame.

He never told anybody, least of all the doctor himself. Love was nothing more than excitable neurotransmitters and patterns of rushing dopamine and endorphin-soaked neuroses. Love was as fragile as it was persistent, but it was not something to romanticize. Love was simply a series of chemical reactions arranged in a certain order. He could ignore it and hide it until the next night alone under the covers. And so life went on.

To fall in love was to surrender to biology, to relinquish reason in favor of fluttering dopamine and quickened heartbeats. Isa could accept this. He was not one to deny self-evident truths. He was, after all, made of chemicals himself; prone to natural fluctuations.

 _Why Ryuuji?_ he wondered. _Why Ryuuji Kawara in particular?_

There was the part that Isa could not quite rely on science to answer.

* * *

The illness came on suddenly, Isa heard in the weeks after the service. He had fallen down after a completely uneventful dinner and refused to regain consciousness; within hours his fever had spiked beyond the pale and it was clear that this was the end. His immune system had utterly shut down; one by one his organs failed and he slipped into that hazy state between life and death.

Ryuuji was the one drowning, his lungs filling with fluid, and yet with each passing moment Isa found himself less and less able to breathe. Some confused part of him rejected the situation entirely, and he felt himself unable to convert the information he was seeing through the plexiglass into information that his brain could adequately process. But as Ryuuji coughed and coughed and _coughed_ and doubled over with his emaciated arms folded in defeat across his chest, reality swung at Isa like something physical and he couldn’t dodge it in time.

 _Why not me,_ Isa had whispered a thousand times as Ryuuji’s heart shuddered to a stop. But science could not answer this question for him either, and so Isa lived doggedly on.

* * *

“Merry! Merry Christmas!” _Isa! Isa came to see Miru and Kaku!_

“Christmas?” _What’s wrong, Isa?_

Isa kneels at the entrance to the holding room. His cane clatters against the cement.

“Merry?” _Is Isa sick?_

“No,” Isa croaks. “I’m just—just blue.”

“Christmas?” _Is it because of Daddy?_

“Merry Christmas?” _Because Daddy won’t see Miru and Kaku anymore?_

“Yes,” Isa says. “Yes…he won’t—won’t see you anymore—”

“Merry?” _When is he coming back?_

The dam breaks and tears fall.

* * *

He’s drifting, drifting, temporally dislodged, and in the next memory it’s December and he’s on the way to the staff room from the infirmary to cross reference his duplicate medical records with the updated ones from the Party. A snatch of dialogue makes him double back.

“There is a train,” Nanaki is saying, in his whispery, serene lilt, and Shuu stops in the hallway outside 2-3, clipboard in his hand, to listen. The professor’s voice is oddly hypnotic. “A train with a hundred people on it, which is hurtling towards a cliff. There is nothing you can do.”

The class comes alight with questions, but Nanaki gestures to the blackboard, on whose surface there is some sort of complex diagram involving a series of interconnected circles. “Bear with me,” he says. “It will make sense in a moment.” He erases a line, redraws it nearby. “What if you are able to change the path of the train, saving everyone on board but killing someone standing on the tracks?”

“Can you just tell them to move out of the way?” asks the hunter-gatherer with a shrug, and Shuu scoffs under his breath.

“No,” says Nanaki simply. “This is a thought experiment. It is a fatality for the sake of discussion.”

“Save the hundred lives at the expense of one,” Shirogane says, looking haughtily about the room for corroboration. “It’s simple. Nobody wants to admit it, but it’s obviously the only acceptable course of action.”

Nanaki looks at him curiously. “All right. Now, I am going to up the ante,” he says. “Say there are five hundred people on the train, and a hundred more standing on the tracks. Which group would you save then?”

Shirogane begins to say something, reconsiders his words, then ducks his head, not meeting Nanaki’s eyes.

“What about a thousand on the track versus a thousand and one on the train?” Nanaki says. “Nine billion to seven billion?”

A flurry of dark confusion. Nobody seems ready to answer.

“That’s a long bit of track,” says the hunter-gatherer at last, and Kawara's son, sitting at the desk next to her, laughs in spite of himself.

“It’s never as simple as it seems,” Nanaki says. “Are all lives inherently equal to one another? How does one begin to measure the merits of a soul?”

The class sits, subdued and silent, and Nanaki stifles a yawn. “Something to think about,” he says, draping his shawl more comfortably around himself. “It’s only a thought experiment.”

* * *

_Only a thought experiment,_ echoes in Isa’s brain, jarring him awake. He’s slumped at his desk, which slides and blurs a bit in front of his eyes. He reaches for his glasses and finds that they are already on his face. Sitting up gives way to even more confusion, and it takes a moment before he remembers why he is seeing the pearly whiteness of the infirmary rather than the dim interior of the break room at Takaba Labs. This time he’s sure he’s awake; he can remember feeling woozy at this morning’s staff meeting and falling asleep at his desk and neglecting the now disheveled pile of paperwork upon which his head had been resting.

There’s a knock and the half-open door swings open to admit Sakazaki, looking carefully, immaculately casual. Ah. It’s later than he had thought. It’s all right. It’s all right. He will work through the fever; he will work through the pain. If Sakazaki doesn’t notice, then he can—

“You look awful, Doctor,” says Sakazaki, crossing his arms and leaning against the door jamb. He gives a roguish grin as Isa combs through his hair and reties the ribbon one-handed, irked. “Shall I neaten your desk for you while you head home for the day?”

“I should think not,” Isa—Shuu—says. “I’ve fallen behind in my work. I’ll need to make up for lost time. Kindly fetch the latest samples from the containment unit and we can begin.”

Sakazaki disappears behind the curtains. Shuu winces, flexing his fingers. “And bring an extra set of linens, Sakazaki,” he calls after him, standing up from the desk with difficulty.

Yes, he thinks, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves. There is still much to be done.

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading Tim Morton's Dark Ecology and to my delight he mentioned Tom Stoppard's Darkside and the thought experiment section contained therein. The rest of it bloomed from that one passage. It occurred to me while writing this that there's that meme going around tumblr which spoofs the exact same thought experiment, with the train tracks and the lever that plays Smash Mouth's All Star. I imagine the conversation went somewhere in that direction after Shuu walked off and stopped listening.


End file.
